(6)Magus vs (11)Vincent Valentine 2018
Ulti's Analysis Dammit Magus, you got my hopes up again. At least this time it happened in a match we all knew you'd lose, but still. This dude was one day vote away from what would have been one of the funniest upsets in contest history. Confession time. I never grew out of being a fan of villains, loners, anti-heroes, badasses, or the dark brooding fake gothic types. I don't try to be some badass prick in real life or whatever, I just find them more interesting characters by and large in fiction. Heroes all do the same thing. Villains and anti-heroes and such are far more complex. I could point out a litany of examples where the public is actually on my side on this and tunes in in massive numbers, like Walter White, Dexter, Thanos, Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Crow, John Wick, Omar Little, Jack Bauer, Tony Soprano, Tyler Durden, Patrick Bateman, The Godfather, or a massive number of Game of Thrones and Quentin Tarantino characters, but I'll mainly stick to video games here since this is a video game analysis. Erm, uh.... okay I went outside video games there, but hey! Some of my favorite gaming characters are people like Magus, Vincent, Cloud, Squall, Auron, Beatrix, Yuri Lowell, Vergil, Shadow the Hedgehog, Alucard, Solid Snake, Kefka, Sephiroth, Big Boss, Garrus, Lightning (sue me), Wesker, Kratos Aurion, Riku, JC Denton, Adam Jensen, Manfred von Karma, Master Chief (sue me), Nocturne, Sovereign, the Old Gods from World of Warcraft (SUE ME), Night Stalker, a whole host of other MOBA characters INCLUDING DRAVEN DO NOT @ ME, Kratos, Samus, GLaDOS, practically any ninja, Akuma, Javik.... you get the idea. I could keep going. You might call them edgelords. I call them Lawful Evil. Orzhov Syndicate forever. I dunno, I just find that archetype awesome. Sue me. So for me this match was awesome on a couple levels, not the least of which is Magus shocking the world for 5 hours. For the first 5 hours of this poll, things were either deadlocked or within 100 votes, and people had a lot of hope Magus could pull this upset off. On top of that, Vincent and Final Fantasy 7 haven't exactly been clutch lately. I had hope myself, but it was very cautious optimism for two reasons. First of all, I've seen way too many contest matches at this point and one trend in deadlocked matches has become exceedingly glaring. There is always one character in a very slight lead trying to shake the other one off. Very very rarely does it go back and forth. And almost always, the character doing the shaking wins. In this case, it was Vincent. So that's point number one. Point number two. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2088-devil-division-round-1-magus-vs-knuckles-the-echidna https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3272-division-8-round-1-shepard-magus-sandbag-sonic https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4563-southwest-division-final-alucard-vs-dracula-frog-vs-magus The last time Magus was actually clutch was in 2003 against Ganondorf, which is a result that looks weirder every year. I had zero delusions the guy would actually pull this off, and was the least surprised guy on the planet when Vincent finally buried him. Still proud of the guy and still love him, but come on. It's Magus. We really need a Magus v Tidus match so we can have an answer on who our least clutch character is. Lightning_Strikes's Analysis What happened?: This match was basically SBAllen's love letter to us, pitching two fallen legends against each other. Magus has undeperformed consistently since 2005 (whether or not 2005 is included is debatable), not even appearing in 2006 and bombing really, really badly against Alucard in 2010. He is arguably a fraud, as he basically had two inarguably good performances and that's it. Vincent was good for longer, but just bombed in 2013 (pic sabotage or otherwise). Even on that though, he looked well clear if Magus. Then the match starts and Magus took the lead after the first few updates (FF7 winning the board vote wtf). It went back and forth for a bit before Vincent finally stayed ahead, but he never built a big lead. What could this mean?: Oh my god, Vincent looked so damn bad here. Even with a Chrono Trigger boost, which is believable, he should have beaten Magus by more than this. He shouldn't look substantially worse than Alucard. Would Vincent lose to Peach now? Is that how far we have come? He might be alright against Auron because of SFF but he is screwed in the long term. Safer777's Analysis When Vincent first appeared in the contests he was strong. Really strong. We called him the N9 breaker! In fact he did beat a N9er but that was in multi way matches. When he first appeared in 1VS1 he won a division! Amazing! So damn strong! And he kept doing good. But in 2013 something happened. There were rallies sure. But man he was in a 3-way match and he finished last. Okay fine. Mewtwo was strong back then. And he had rallies, everyone knows that. But the guy that came 2nd? Phoenix Wright! What? Man I heard so many people back then screaming about the bad picture that Vincent got(I was one of them too!). I don't know what happened then. Anyways for this match. It was a toss up actually. 2 fallen characters here. Most favored Vincent to win and he did that. But look at the result. Pathetic. Magus is weak you know nowadays! Also there is something that people said after this match that I hadn't think about. Vincent is mysterious and he has a cool design. And that is. I mean he is an OPTIONAL party member and his Limit Breaks suck! Seriously! In a game where Cloud, Barret and Cid can hit multiple times with their Limit Breaks, Vincent turns into a monster for his Limit Breaks and we can't even control him! And he got a spin off game too! Guess if you have a cool design you deserve anything. Still he managed to win I guess. A bad victory is still a victory. The prediction percentage was just under 50% for Vincent too. Magus was the slight favorite it seems. Also for Magus...man this guy has fallen so much too. Tsunami's Analysis Remember what I said about forever-overrated FRAUDS? Board 8 still hasn't gotten over the fact that a match between two newcomers that was supposed to be debatable (although most people did eventually choose correctly) ended up being a 79-21 blowout, and that Vincent went on to upset Squall. Also there was something about a 4way match that reversed an existing 1v1 loss for Vincent? Bah, it's a fourway; it's not important. Besides, he was the lone PSX character against three characters that shared the SNES, one of which was Link. People blamed Vincent's loss to Phoenix in 2013 solely on the pic sabotage, and while I agree that Vincent should still be naturally stronger than Phoenix, a bigger issue there was that people just didn't care enough about Vincent. Board 8 loves its Phoenix Wright, so we weren't going to abandon him to hop on the Mewtwo bandwagon. And let's not beat around the bush: everything that happened from the moment Draven took X and Ryu to the woodshed was centered around trying to stop him at all costs. We identified Pokémon as the one thing that might be able to muster up a strong enough counterrally should Link fail to stop the threat with his natural strength, and since the other Pokémon were too far away in the bracket and would SFF each other out before the finals, that meant Mewtwo was our rally target. 2010, however, showed exactly where Vincent really sits on the FF7 totem pole. Both he and Tifa faced Sephiroth, and one of them did a lot better than the other. But here, he was up against Magus, another character that crushed it in his contest debut and has never lived up to the hype. It was only fitting that the two had to battle it out, and the fact that it was so close should tell you exactly how strong Vincent isn't. Vincent won with 51.89%, which is still comfortable enough, but every Oracle that picked this match to finish under 52-48 picked Magus to win it. With good reason considering that he was the underdog, but still, not one person who believed in Vincent to win it at all thought it would be this close. Category:2018 Contest Matches